Backrooms, gen AI and the heatwave
A movie review from someone who doesn’t know shit about movies or reviews, and a wide tangent about generative AI. Obviously spoilers for the movie Backrooms (2026) and for my own hangups.
July 2026
At the tail end of the second heatwave of the year – and definitely not the last, I went to the cinema. This in itself is already an irreconcilable idea in the face of this disaster of a summer and global climate deregulation, and there wasn't even any AC in the room. I went to see Backrooms (no articles) and when I started writing this it had finally gotten cool enough for me to form two consecutive thoughts about something, by the end of the week we were entering the third heatwave of the year, so that's my excuse for the meandering.
A beautiful glass half full
I rarely go to the cinema. I only see a handful of movies a year, and even less on the big screen, but I was glad this won the pick. Backrooms is a visually stunning piece, where you're constantly torn between wanting to keep your eyes glued to the screen not to miss a thing and flinching away. It delivers tenfold on Kane Parson's visual language, with his iconic endless yellow corridors that have imprinted themselves on the collective (online) consciousness, and uncanny clusters of furniture. The cinematography is on point, the sound design incredible and creepy. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a great actor playing a role that sadly doesn't do him justice, (which at best suffers from color blind writing and at worst falls victim to racist tropes). All is tense and uncertain, like at any point the audience might itself start to slip into the Backrooms.
I followed Kane Parson's Backrooms series from early on (It was the backdrop of my Halloween get together in 2023) although I never finished it. For all it's aesthetic successes, I found the film's scenario lacking the mystery and world building introduced in the YouTube series. I saw it with a friend who's seen all the videos from the web series, and who recommended I watch the latest one for more insight into the story. This left me wondering who this movie is for: unaware mainstream audiences discovering the universe? Fans of the established lore? I'm somewhere in between, and I'm not entirely satisfied. Yes the movie is beautiful and scary, but even without knowing a lot about horror, I think we're allowed to expect more from the genre. The characters fade behind the intricate visuals, which cheapens the lot to me. Motivations felt muddy, characters seemed shallow when you can tell there could be more to them. The racist tropes thing sticks out like a sore thumb. I felt that the message, if there was any, never quite landed. And yet, it had my gears turning the whole time.
The gen AI metaphor
One of the first glances into the Backrooms we get is a banner from the furniture store clipping through the ceiling. Clark, confronted with the weirdness of the Backrooms, almost reaches out to it and then changes course. This visual immediately made me think oh, this is like if you saw an AI generated image come to life: the theme was set in my brain, and it did not leave me for the next two hours.
Like describing a dog to someone who's never seen a dog and asking them to draw it
This sentence, repeated throughout the movie, is exactly how I would describe how generative AI works. Or rather how it doesn't work. About the race for and in the fight against AI, I find myself reminding people over and over again that an AI doesn't know what a dog is. For all the pictures of your pets it stole, it doesn't understand what a dog is, it doesn't understand anything.
In a way, Clark and the other characters in the Backrooms get to experience gen AI output as tangible objects. They get confronted with something like AI semantic reality: when Clark first steps into the Backrooms, he is met with stacked chairs, and so he expects a chair stacked atop another one. But what he gets is "stacked chairs" a semantic entity, a single unit: This is how gen AI work. Someone prompts a stack of chairs, AI creates a stack of chairs. In a fixed image, it looks the same, and serves its purpose. Encountered in the flesh, it is jarring – the Backrooms doesn't understand the difference. Whatever brought these chairs into the world did so as a single idea, and so the reality of stacked chairs as we know it slips away. This is what happens in the Backrooms: the melting down of familiar concepts into unfamiliar shapes, entangled. Reality, misremembered, misconstrued. Everything is a copy of a reconstructed reality, like Mary’s childhood home, progressively melting before our eyes into an unrecognizable husk.
The timeline of Kane Parson's Backrooms follows evolution in generative AI to a beat. The first video in the YouTube series came out in 2022, a year after the first iteration of DALL-E (OpenAi's image generator) launched and the same year Midjourney hit discord. The successful video series came out alongside the early gen AI image outputs: the fascinating, uncanny looks of machines hallucinating shapes. The novel, slightly ugly forms relied on the human eye picking up on familiar patterns: pareidolia did almost as much work at the LLMs to create its subjects back then. Before we truly came to realize the ethical cataclysm that gen AI use would represent, the fascination with the uncanny output was truly taking: fear and excitement – like candy to human beings. The Backrooms webseries felt exactly like that: weird and slightly off, familiar enough that you recognize the shape, convoluted enough that you could blink and lose it. Parson's added scientific exploration and cynical capitalist agenda to the classic internet creepy pasta sealed the deal in making the Backrooms' success a sign of the times.
Thinking about AI obviously feels different in 2026. For a lot of people, the existential threat is very real. Workers, artists, human relations, and of course the very earth on which we live have all come under threat of rapid destruction heralded by big tech and its need for more —more water, more space, more power, more data, more money. The terrifying buzzing sound indicating danger throughout the Backrooms echoes the endless noise made by data centers around American cities and the zanana drones all over occupied Gaza.
Is the gen AI metaphor intentional? Hard to say. Kane Parson has come out saying he wishes he could just make generative AI disappear and is interested in its part in visual reality. But the movie doesn't so much make a commentary on AI as set up a good backdrop for it to happen (this is true, unfortunately, for a lot of themes you can make out in the piece).
I can trust what is real
AI is nothing less than a technological frenzy that swallows all in its wake, an invisible tide chasing us through endless corridors. And yet, even for people who reject generative AI use, a fascination remains with AI's mistakes. It is satisfying to spot the weird finger, the characteristic blur, the unfocused eyes. It is reassuring; in a way, that we are still in control. It is feeling safe – I am still able to tell what is real or not, they didn't get me (this time). Watching the Backrooms elicits the same feeling. Safe behind the screen, like Async's scientists, we get to peer at the fascinating senseless corridors and shoes disappearing inside the floor, and know we are safe outside.
There is real pleasure in the unexpected and grandiose designs of the Backrooms. I found myself thinking, like I had when watching Parson's previous work, that I would love to just look at footage of someone walking through the rooms for hours (in fact I resented the use of the handheld footage in the film, which I found pertinent on the YouTube videos but cheap on the big screen). Interestingly, the aesthetic pleasure of the Backrooms follows the viewer outside of the delimitation of the place, into the "real world". Away from the yellow corridors, the movie offers gorgeous shots of signs, buildings and machines bursting with color and symmetry. The unnerving architecture and weirdly arranged furniture also spills out into the store, where Clark lives a pantomime of a home life.
If the visual language of the Backrooms follow outside, are you really safe? Are you really able to tell the difference? At the end of the movie, Mary runs into a replica of the furniture store, and for a beat, you're tempted to think she made it out —so is she, only to realize it's just another loop, just another copy. She is stuck in the type of recursive pattern she endeavored to help people out of, one guided meditation tape at a time.How much longer then will you be able to escape? How long before there is no way to tell whether a picture, video or text is real and not pieced together by an LLM? How many phone calls have you already made to company representatives that were answered by AI agents, sometimes unbeknownst to you?
The Backrooms, like generative AI, wear away at our sense of trust. The movie's characters are defined by their loneliness: Clark, ever since the breaking point with his wife, has been alone, his whole life contained in the failed furniture store. Mary, despite her seemingly normal social life, is haunted by echoes of herself as a little girl, sitting alone and scared in her mother's broken home. Our main characters have no one to trust, certainly not each other. The unlucky few (Bobby and Kat) who go into the Backrooms as a pair get violently, physically ripped apart, and eventually killed off screen, never reunited. After discovering the Backrooms, Clark tries to reach out to Mary. But he rescinds the crumb of trust he extended the second he sees her doubt him. When she in turn reaches out to try and help him out of the Backrooms, he breaks her trust and eventually hurts her. The Backrooms experience is marked by a lack of trust and an absence of human connection.
The characters stepping into the Backrooms get to experience in real life what AI output is: fascinating, wrong, unreal and isolating. They have no way of saving each other because they are siloed, in towers of their own making.
The film is skim on explanation as to what the Backrooms is. After spending time in close contact with the space, our main character forms a theory: the Backrooms are memories, places remembered, remembering themselves, and every time they do they get a little more wrong. This is a reference to memory distortion, a mechanism whereby every time you revisit a memory, you're reinterpreting it with the knowledge, emotions and outlook of your present self, thus 'changing' the memory itself. This is a great tool in horror, as it plays on the common human fear of losing grip on your perception, your thoughts and ultimately, your sense of self.
Four years into the experiment, and after having consumed great swathes of human data (pictures, paintings, texts, most of which either illegally or unethically acquired.) generative AI is on the path to becoming like the Backrooms: a senseless space haphazardly remembering itself. Generative AI is now feeding on memory, on itself, and degrading because of it, looping around on itself. An increasingly large part of content posted onto the internet is AI generated. This effectively means the internet sucks: you'll look up something on google and get 15 different website repeating exactly the same thing. This also means the algorithm gobbling up every last bit of content for LLM training is feeding on AI generated data rather than the human stuff it need to copy. That's poison in the slop - recursively generated data that should eventually end up causing the LLM to collapse.. Not before it's taken most of the Internet’s structure down with it though.
Holding on to broken things
We all have our loops. Our habits. Behaviors that keep us walking in circles. Reaching for the same solutions over and over again. Thinking each time will take you somewhere new, but they don't. And still, it's the neural pathway of least resistance. A path you made. It's the one that kept you safe when you were a child.
From YouTube to feature film, the jump from exclusively expertly animated to live action is a success. The idea to set the story inside an isolated strip mall furniture store was absolutely brilliant. From this location, the story is unmoored in time. Hazily set in the 90s, not much effort is made to ground the characters in time. Like the furniture store, with it's mix of modern items and timeless classics, the story is untethered. How long does Clark spent in the Backrooms ? It is implied that he spends quite some time jumping between his life and the Backrooms to map it out, Navidson's house style - On that note, I am really torn about Clark having a relatively "easy" way out of the space, seeing as the horror in the web series (and the original story) came from the characters inability to leave once they fell into the backrooms. Then Clark stops leaving of his own accord and spends enough time there to start understanding its structure and its inhabitants.
It seems something is missing from the movie, and the whole thing feels untethered. It is at its core a story of haunting but there is no houses to haunt. And yet, the two charters carry their hauntings with them. Mary is constantly reliving the destruction of her childhood place, and even carries a physical piece of the broken home it came from with her. As for Clark, he is obsessed with his wife kicking him out of his house. Unable to move on, he recreates a home in the store and then again in the Backrooms. He plays house. These character's houses aren't haunted, they are haunted by the homes they lost and cannot let go of. These homes were not happy places for them – Clark's relationship with his wife had been strained for years, Mary was neglected and scared. And yet time and time again they return to them. But they are unable to recon with these habits, and cling to their status quo, as proven by Clark's short lived relief when he cries We don't have to change!
The Backrooms is a visual translation of the way we stay attached to things that hurt us because the familiar feels safer than the unknown that awaits when moving on. Places you used to love and that didn't love you back, bitterly misremembered. The haunted house I carry with me agonizes online, where people stay on platforms decaying beyond recognition: micro and regular blogging owned by Nazis, AI generated drop shipping "handmade or vintage items", inspiration pin boards that are half ads and half ugly AI pictures. And it is one thing seeing the damage reactionary policy, tech billionaire greed and AI takeover does on your feed, and another to feel the data center exacerbated heatwave plow through your region.
This is not for you
What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielweski, 2000
At the end of the day, Backrooms was a beautiful backdrop for me to paint ideas on. It is not a bad movie, and it certainly had things to say, but it shied away from its own themes too much. It had the means for a miriad social commentary and did almost none, especially regarding race. For what ? For an appeal to a wider audience? To leave more space to amazing set design and well timed jump scares? To pave the way for a second movie, after this one is no doubt a commercial success ?
I wish it dwelt on more than dread and loneliness, I wish it took more time to push its characters to feel the wrongness within themselves reflected in the beautiful wrongness of the space. I wish it had as much to tell as it had to show.
I couldn't finish formatting this article before the third heatwave hit the country. The heat is only starting to rise and already my body is tense, my mind adrift. I am seized by a potent powerless rage as my government keeps signing new laws weakening our already meager environmental rules, drafted in their AC cooled offices. This might also be what was missing from the Backrooms to me. Rage. The characters seem a little too willing to take the situation in stride. To me only Kat's reaction seemed fitting, but in comparison to the others she almost looked like she was overreacting. And by the end, in a move that is almost too on the nose, the genre aware character literally gets fridged –and it doesn't even really advance Clark's story. The other characters just accept the reality of the backrooms. Phill from Async seems especially passive, telling Mary her fate is out of his hands. In return, she seems ready to accept it. Clark stops leaving the backrooms and learns to live there. Adaptive to a fault, these characters will get used to anything as long as it means they don't have to change. A lot of people are like this about climate change, about covid, about generative AI, and I feel like I'm Kat, screaming we gotta get out of here, but no one's listening.
So to me Backrooms was just a beautiful glass half full.. The type you get to fill up with whatever you like. Mine is brimming with thoughts about generative AI. What are you gonna put away in your solution for all future storage and housing needs?
